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eurg comments on Humans are utility monsters - Less Wrong
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I think this is wrong in an interesting way: it's an Industrial Age blind spot. Only people who've never hunted or herded and buy their meat wrapped in plastic have never thought about animal welfare. Many indigenous hunting cultures ask forgiveness when taking food animals. Countless cultures have taboos about killing certain animals. Many animal species' names translate to "people of the __." As far as I can tell, all major religions consider wanton cruelty to animals a sin, and have for thousands of years, though obviously, people dispute the definition of cruelty.
The asking for forgiveness may indicate that people somehow thought of the act as killing, but that did not change their actions. Humans have had a distinctive influence on the local megafauna wherever they showed up. A cynic might write that "humans did not really care about the well-being of ...". We for instance also have taboos of eating dogs and cats, but the last time I checked it was not because of value their lives, but because they are cute. It's mostly organized lying to feel OK.
What? Of course people care about the lives of dogs and cats.
Anecdotal Evidence: All the people I've seen cry over the death of a dog. Not just children, either. I've seen grown men and women grieve for months over the death of a beloved dog.
Even if their sole reason for caring is that their cute, that wouldn't invalidate the fact that they care. There's some amount of "organized lying" in most social interactions, that doesn't imply that people don't care about anything. That's silliness, or puts such a high burden of proof/ high standard of caring (even when most humans can talk about degrees of caring more or less) as to be both outside the realm of what normal people talk about and totally unfalsifiable.
I guess I'm not cynical?
People have to eat. It's consistent to feel that animal life has value but to know that your tribe needs meat, and to prioritize the second over the first. The fact that you value an animal life doesn't mean you value it above all else. And the fact that humans wiped out the Giant Sloth/Mammoth/whatever only necessitates that we were really good hunters. It says nothing about our motivations.
Also, I think you would find it really hard to disentangle cuteness from empathy, if that's what you're trying to do.
More because we regularly socialize with them. People are not, generally, in favour of killing just the ugly pets.
(And, this is purely anecdotal, but viewing animals more as less-intelligent individuals with a personality and so on and less as fleshy automatons seems to correlate with pets.)
Asking for forgiveness is usually a hunter-gatherer thing. Before agriculture brought starchy grains and dairy on the scene animal fat was the major calorie source, and vegetarianism would have meant only fruits, nuts, leafy vegetables, and tubers. And you'd need a lot of tubers in order for this to be a sufficiently calorie rich diet.
You are right, of course. I did not want to imply that a vegan diet would have been feasible until recent advances.